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ABSTRACT
Women are now the majority in undergraduate studies in many higher education systems, yet men and women tend to enrol at different rates in different fields of study and institutions. As a result, gender segregation is a prominent feature of contemporary higher education. Most previous studies have focused on gender composition in fields of study. In contrast, we considered college-level study in the Israeli context and asked whether composition is related to on-time undergraduate degree completion. By merging census data with other information, we followed students from high school into higher education and distinguished those who completed their undergraduate degree within the allotted timeframe from those who did not. Our results indicate that for both men and women, studying in an institution with a higher percentage of men is associated with reduced chances of on-time graduation, after controlling for socioeconomic background, previous achievement, field of study and college selectivity. This suggests that equalizing gender ratios in male-dominated institutions, which are often technology-oriented, will benefit both women, as they will enter lucrative technological fields of study, and men, who will otherwise suffer the disadvantage of attending institutions with lower chances of on-time graduation and possibly a less positive learning climate and study culture.
Acknowledgments
The authors wish to thank the editor and anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments. This work was supported by the Edmond de Rothschild Foundation in Israel. The construction of the data file was supported by a grant from the Israeli Science Foundation to Hanna Ayalon (grant # 367/08).
Disclosure of potential conflicts of interest
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1. Bar Ilan university, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Haifa University, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, and Tel Aviv University.
2. These files were merged by the ICBS using national identification numbers, that were removed before the dataset was made available to the researchers. The analysis was carried out according to the strict regulations of the ICBS that were designed to prevent the identification of any person included in the dataset.
Additional information
Funding
Notes on contributors
Yariv Feniger
Yariv Feniger is a sociologist of education in the Department of Education at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev who is mainly interested in educational inequality and education policy. Building on diverse theoretical perspectives and utilizing different research methods, he aims at developing better understanding of how social, cultural, political, and organizational forces shape opportunities for learning and achievement in different educational settings. His current studies focus on gender and education, social inequality in higher education and the influences of standardization on education policy and practice.
Oded Mcdossi
Oded Mcdossi is a sociologist of stratification, inequality, and institutions, whose current work centres on educational disadvantage, mobility, and integration with a particular focus on the wellbeing and decision-making of first-generation college students. He holds a PhD from Tel Aviv University. He is currently a post-doctoral fellow at the Department of Sociology at The Ohio State University.
Hanna Ayalon
Hanna Ayalon is Professor Emerita of Sociology of Education at the Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Tel Aviv University, Israel. She was chair of the Department of Educational Policy at the School of Education (1995–1999) and the Department of Sociology (2005–2007). She served as the chair of the University Committee for Admission Policy (2010–2012). Hanna served as board member of several journals including Sociology of Education and Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis. Recently she served as member and chair in ERC Panels on Advanced Grants.
Hanna’s research focuses on inequality in education. She published numerous journal articles on a variety of educational topics including social consequences of the expansion of higher education; Curriculum differentiation and educational inequality; Educational reforms and their impact on educational inequality; second chance in education; curricular tracking and inequality; first-generation college students; horizontal stratification of higher education. She has published in journals such as Sociology of Education, European Sociological Review, Social Science Research, American Journal of Education, Teacher College Record, British Journal of Sociology of Education, Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, Comparative Education Review.